


How the Story Ends

by thedevilchicken



Category: Roman Holiday (1953)
Genre: F/M, Hopeful Ending, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 02:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21067001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Joe writes a book. His heroine bears a striking similarity to someone he once met, and is about to meet again.





	How the Story Ends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tablelamp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tablelamp/gifts).

Joe doesn't really know much about royalty. 

There's a lot of things he doesn't know much about, like modern art, or what's under the hood of a standard automobile, or that elusive thing his pa liked to call "real work". He has a bachelor's in Literature from a pretty good school, which absolutely qualifies him to know his Shelley from his Keats if nothing else at all, even without a royal education. Journalism came later, when he was exhausted by the idea of ever writing his own novel. Everything worth saying had already been said long before he'd been born, so he settled for reporting instead. Sometimes he even liked it, even if he didn't much like himself for what it made of him.

Eighteen months after the princess left Rome, Joe started writing the darn novel. Once he'd started, it turned out he couldn't've stopped if he'd been paid to, not even when he wanted to; he had appointments to keep, a girl he'd been seeing off and on for the past few weeks, interviews for Hennessy, coffee with Irving or some madcap photoshoot, but he blew all that off and slaved over his typewriter day and night until his landlord threatened to evict him - at least he's pretty sure that's what the frown on his face was meant to mean as he mimed the typewriter's familiar clack-clack-clack. And maybe he didn't want to let the room on the via Margutta go, because he loved the space and where else would he go to, but the pages of his book were just everywhere. So was she. She was in the sheets on his bed and the pyjamas he'd lent her to sleep in that night. Sometimes, in his less gentlemanly hours, he wondered if she'd been naked underneath her borrowed clothes. But they for sure weren't a silk nightdress with pretty pink rosebuds on it, and he knew better than to dwell on _what if_. 

The novel wasn't about her, except that it was. It wasn't about a princess - in the book she was a spy, but it was still her even when it wasn't. Maybe it made it easier to write when it was her face he was conjuring, except he's not sure it didn't just make it ten times harder. Still, he knows there was a notion in the back of his head that maybe, if he could just do this one thing, he'd be worthy of her in a way he hadn't been before, back when he'd been just another washed-up news reporter. So, he wrote. And, when he was done, he called an old friend from school who'd gone into publishing, who said he'd read it and tell him what he thought. After some back and forth, some notes, revisions, his old friend's family business published it. People bought it, so he figured maybe it wasn't all down to his connections. And maybe what he made wasn't enough to make him rich, but it was enough to get him back to New York City. 

Over the years that came after, he'd like to say he forgot her, but he went ahead and wrote another book. Maybe they weren't great works of literature, but it was like she was always there with him, in the apartment that he bought that she'd never even seen. New York definitely wasn't Rome, nothing like it at all, and his apartment was clean and neat and tidy and full of his regrets. He'd left the bed that she'd slept in back over there in Italy with all the places that they'd been together. But when he put on his pyjamas at the end of the day, there was always a lingering thought of her in them, with the sleeves and the ankles rolled up a good nine inches and the drawstring at her waist cinched in as tight as it would go. Maybe it wasn't a look she could've carried at glamorous parties, but in his room on the via Margutta she'd made it look just swell. 

When he wrote book number three, more than three years had passed. He called his heroine Anya, an agent of a country he'd made up who walked a line between honor and duty and the things she wanted for herself. In book number three, she met a man who she could never stay with, an ordinary man, just minding his own business, who took her in when she was reeling from a drug someone had slipped into her drink at an embassy ball. She slept in his bed, wearing one of his shirts. But instead of just one day before her duty called her back, she stayed for four - he imagined what they could've done with three more days, what she might've wanted, what he might've been persuaded to give, and then wrote about it. He even set it in Rome. That was fine, though, just fine, because Irving hated spy novels and Joe was pretty sure honest-to-God princesses were too darn busy to read much of anything but Keats. Or Shelley. Honestly, he was starting to forget which of them it'd been. 

Then, one day while he was writing book four, there was a knock on the door. When he opened it, bleary-eyed, still in his pyjamas with a robe thrown over, it was a man in a suit with a solemn expression who said, "Mr. Joseph Bradley?" just like he already knew. Maybe he did; when Joe nodded and the guy passed him the envelope, it turned out it had come from the embassy. Maybe they had all kinds of files on him, just in case. 

She wasn't in New York, at least not then. She was in Buenos Aires as part of some new good will tour of the Americas, like anyone had anything but good will for Princess Ann, but in one week's time she'd be in New York. There was an invitation in the envelope, to a high-class party her country's embassy was throwing in her honor. And when the messenger had left, Joe stared at it for a moment before he tossed it into a drawer by the door. He had no intention of going, he told himself. He didn't want to see her, and she wouldn't want to see him. It had to be some kind of stunt his publisher had managed to pull, or maybe the embassy thought a photo op with a popular American writer would do something great for the Princess's publicity. Joe wasn't interested in that, he told himself as he went back to bed. He wasn't going to ambush her someplace she had to be polite and act like they'd never met before. Except, of course, that was exactly what he did. 

He owned a tux; it just needed cleaning. His shoes just needed polish. He definitely needed a haircut. And each step of the way he told himself, hey, he wasn't doing anything he wouldn't've had to do anyway, some other time. It just didn't come as a surprise when he got there, one week later, dropped off by a cab outside the embassy with an invitation in his pocket that he'd screwed up and smoothed out so many times it looked like a dead sea scroll. He handed it over at the door and they checked the list and they waved him inside, and sure, he's seen fancy places before, but the decor for the party was really something else. Someone must've told the decorators that the princess liked pink roses because the place looked like they'd bought out all the flower shops in the entire city. And he took a glass of champagne from a passing tray and tried to pretend he wasn't there at all. He just wanted to see her. They didn't even need to talk. 

Then, there she was. They announced her, and she came into the room, and it wasn't like before, and it wasn't like they'd never been apart; it was like he felt every last one of the years and months and weeks and days since that day in Rome. She didn't look different, not really, a little older but didn't they all? And he looked at her as he chatted with some of the other guests, out of the corner of his eye except he was pretty sure he couldn't've been any more obvious if he'd tried to be. He'd never been anything like the spies in his novels, after all. Maybe he'd lied to her, once upon a time, and maybe she'd believed him, but that didn't mean he'd ever been good at it. Maybe she'd just been used to people telling her the truth. Sometimes he'd told himself he'd done her a favor, but he didn't believe a word of it.

"Have you met the princess before?" one of the other guests asked him. She was a thoroughly well-dressed woman maybe ten years older than he was, who he knew had something to do with fashion. What exactly she had to do with fashion he couldn't have said, but he probably also couldn't've said what fashion was anyway. 

"Once," he replied. "I was a reporter in Rome, oh, about a lifetime ago." 

"When she cut her hair?"

He hid a smile with the rim of his champagne glass. "That seems right," he said. He didn't say he knew it was, because he'd been there to see it. 

There was music. There was dancing. He'd never been much for a waltz but it seemed like everyone else there was, and he and the fashionable older lady somehow wound up on the dancefloor, making the best of it together. He was pretty sure he was too darn tall to be elegant and she was wearing heels as high as the Eiffel Tower, but it took his mind off the princess. Until the tune ended, that was, and he turned, and he found himself face to face with her. 

She held out her hand. He stared at it for a second, with its long white satin glove and a ring or two worn over the fabric; she raised a brow and he took her hand, finally, and he realized after the fact that he'd been meant to kiss it, not shake it. When she smiled, his face felt warm. 

"Would you care to dance, Mr. Bradley?" she asked. 

"Isn't that some kind of breach of etiquette, you asking me?" he replied. 

"I suppose it might be. Do you mind?" 

He didn't, and the wry twist of his mouth probably told her precisely that. She offered him her hand again; this time he took it, and he led her out onto the floor. And frankly, the way she danced maybe made him look good at it, too. He was pretty sure she could've made almost anyone there look good. When you looked at her, you'd never even notice who was with her.

When the dance was finished, a waiter appeared to offer them a drink. She took one, so he did, too. She sipped, so he sipped, as she looked around the room. He knew it was only a brief lull before someone swept her off again, another dance, a speech, some gift being given that she'd graciously accept on her country's behalf, but he was happy to take what he could get. 

"We had sex in your book," she said, glancing at him, smiling ever so politely, and he almost choked on his champagne. "Well, not us, I suppose. But somehow still us." 

"She's not you, you know," he told her, when he'd regained his composure. 

Her smile brightened. She sipped her champagne as she looked at him. "Oh, Joe, of course she is," she said, then laid one gloved hand on his. "I don't mind, you know. I have such adventures when I read your books." 

"You read my books?"

"Of course I do. Why else do you think you're here?"

"You invited me?" 

She squeezed his arm. "Well, who else would it be?"

She had a point, he guessed. 

They danced again, two songs, till her face was pink and kind of glowing from it, and he felt like he'd run a marathon in his best shoes. 

"Run away with me," he said when they were done, only maybe joking, and she laughed, which was probably scandalous. 

"I did once," she said. "I think that was the best day of my life." She took his hands in hers and squeezed, and then she was gone again. He didn't get the chance to tell her that he felt the same, and always had. 

When he woke in the night, he was pretty sure he'd heard a window break. When he got out of bed, golf club in hand like he'd ever really played, she was standing in his office with glass around her feet. There was a sheepish look on her face that suited her a whole lot better than a royal smile she didn't mean. 

"I'll pay for the window," she told him. "Just send the bill to the embassy."

"Princess, I don't give a damn about the window," he replied. 

She slept the night in the top half of his pyjamas while he took the bottom half, and he knew neither of them had anything on underneath. The bed was big enough for them to share. When she kissed him, he knew she meant it. When she touched him, she was nervous but decided. When he touched her, she laughed in unabashed delight.

Then, in the morning, she left. They didn't even get one day.

"Will you write about this in your next book?" she asked, at the door, on her way to the street. 

"Do you want me to?"

"Will there be a happy ending?"

He held her hands in his. "Well now, that depends," he said. 

"On what?"

"On you, princess. Why don't you tell me?"

She didn't say a word, but the way she smiled at him as she left told him everything.

When she was gone, he sat down at his typewriter. He knew exactly how the story ended.


End file.
